April 2005

More from the British Psychological Digest:

When healthy people imagine the quality of life they would have with a chronic illness, their estimates are much more negative than reports from people who actually have a chronic illness.

A recent study by Jason Riis at the University of Michigan confirms this. He asked chronically ill patients and healthy controls to rate their mood when prompted every 90 minutes or so by a pocket computer. This technique minimises the possibility of biased recall or patients putting on a brave face for their carers.

The average mood ratings made on the pocket computer were equally positive among both the patients and healthy controls. Yet when interviewed, the healthy participants predicted their mood would be negative most of them time if they had a chronic kidney illness. And the patients predicted their mood would be much more positive if they’d never had a kidney illness. That is, both groups of participants appeared to underestimate the resilience of people’s mood to illness.

Many studies have found that depression improves with exercise. A study by Lynette C Craft at Michigan State University takes us a step closer to understanding why.

The study set out to examine two proposed explanations for why exercise tends to reduce depression symptoms – self-efficacy (the person’s belief that they can cope with their depression) and distraction.

The study followed nine women on a nine-week exercise programme, and a control group of 10 women not on the programme. All the women were diagnosed with ‘moderate depression’ and were on antidepressants.

The study found that at the end of the programme, the participants had reduced their depression with a strong support for self-efficacy as a causal mechanism. There was less support for distraction as a causal mechanism. The control group’s depression levels were unchanged.

I found this in the BPS Research Digest – well worth subscribing to.

I do wonder if the improvement in depression levels could have been due to the physical effects of exercise as well as improved self-efficacy…